Mara Bonde
Soprano
New England Finalist, 2001

Soprano Mara Bonde has performed in diverse venues throughout the United States and recently traveled to Brussels, Belgium, with the Boston Musical Theater for a NATO Fiftieth-Birthday Tribute. In May 1999 she made her Boston Pops debut under the direction of Keith Lockhart in Brush up your Shakespeare, which was nationally broadcast on PBS's "Evening at Pops." This past year she performed again with the Pops and Keith Lockhart in "A 100th Birthday Tribute to Aaron Copland".

For the 1999-2000 season, Ms. Bonde was in residence with the National Opera Company in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she performed Despina in Così fan Tutte, Clorinda in La Cenerentola, and created the role of Carolina Etheridge in the world premiere of J. Marc Scearce's Kitty Hawk. In Spring 2001 she debuts with The Opera Company of North Carolina singing the title role in Mollicone's Starbird and Frasquita in Carmen.

Other operatic roles include Berta in Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Lake George Opera Festival, Zerlina in Don Giovanni at the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute in San Francisco and Adina in The Elixir of Love, both in Boston, with Longwood Opera and with the Lowell House Opera. Ms Bonde has worked with such conductors as Daniel Beckwith, Martin Pearlman, Bernard Labadie and the late Robert Shaw; she appears as a soloist on that conductor's Telarc recording Appear and Inspire.

Ms Bonde holds a BA degree in French from Mount Holyoke College and a MM degree from Boston University, where she was invited to join the Opera Institute. She has studied at the Université de Paris IV (La Sorbonne) and has sung in music festivals at Tanglewood, Aspen and at the Britten-Pears School with Dame Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge

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